Author: Sonia Eland, Andrew Meek, Gareth Berry

Silos are good for launching things. Historically, businesses evolved siloed structures because they allowed for specialisation and optimisation. This helped them to efficiently launch products and services while building internal organisations with dedicated expertise, tools and processes. They delivered operational efficiency in an age of limited data-sharing – but that age has passed.

Silos are good for launching things. Historically, businesses evolved siloed structures because they allowed for specialisation and optimisation.

Now enterprises are data driven and traditional siloed or business-unit-focused structures are no longer fit for purpose. Worse, they can become sources of inefficiency and needless cost. This is partly because of the convergence between IT and specialist areas of the business for many services. For example, HR and customer onboarding require inputs from many different teams, so a siloed approach simply won’t be efficient.

The problem for many organisations, however, is that their business processes, organisational workflows and IT backbone have been built around these siloed structures.

More importantly, it becomes difficult for organisations to create new efficiencies and new opportunities by reshaping the way they serve their audiences and deliver value. For example, it might be more effective to merge separate sales and support teams into a single ‘customer experience’ unit – but it might be impossible (or impractical) to do so as a stand-alone project.

Adopting a platform approach is the key to realising such benefits, offering a single, unified system to provide rapid deployment of new capabilities, baked-in compliance, governance and security; an ecosystem of approved and ready-to-use apps, services and partners; and more.

Many organisations have been testing the waters with smaller transformation projects, getting early experience and gearing up for an eventual move to a wider adoption. It’s a sensible approach, but its time is done. Whilst starting small may be right, the time for thinking small is over.